Morning Brief — Thursday, November 20
Pretty much everyone working in publishing has heard of The Four-Hour Work Week, the catchily-titled book that made it to The New York Times bestseller list. Some of you may also have heard that the book (and author Timothy Ferriss) made waves online. Mashable talks with Ferriss about his online marketing efforts, which included reaching out bloggers as far as a year in advance of publication. (I’ve sometimes been told not to contact bloggers too far ahead of time, I guess because bloggers and people who read blogs, well, just DON’T know how to preorder books online. Or something.)
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If you need to send large files (Powerpoint presentations or JPEGs, for example), Mashable reminds us we can use You Send It.
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It seems we’re reading about layoffs in the newspaper / magazine business every day now. Even Lucky, one of the most successful magazine debuts in recent years, has met its match.
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Over in New Jersey, as I’m sure everyone has heard, the Newark Star-Ledger has been busy slashing its staff. Editor & Publisher lists the names of journalists *not* taking buy outs. Book editor Deborah Jerome-Cohen’s name was not on the list, so this may not bode well for us.
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Not surprisingly, book coverage has really suffered from the downturn in the print business. My company subscribes to Nexis / Lexis and our librarian has set up daily searches of reviews / mentions of all our imprints’ books. I used to scroll through maybe 50 stories a day that mentioned our books. For the past month or so, I don’t think I’ve seen more than 10 a day.
Social networking miscellany
What would you do if every time you got an email message you had to type in your account name and password and then you couldn’t see who the message was from or what it was about until you opened it? How often would you check email? Would you even bother checking it at all?
Sound ridiculous? Think about this: I’ve just described a voicemail message.
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Catching Flack posts about whether or not one should change one’s social networking profile, particularly as one graduates from college and enters the working world. Not really a consideration for yours truly since we didn’t have social networks when I was in college (mostly on account of the Internet having just being invented), but this situation also applies to authors who already have social networking profiles when their books come out — should an author use their existing profile which may be limited to (mostly) “real” friends and family or should they create a new profile dedicated to the public / readers? For authors who choose to create separate profiles, keep in mind that you can create more than one profile with the same name (obviously, given the number of different people with the same name) although you will need to use a different email address for each profile. Most social networking sites allow you to set different levels of privacy so you could have one profile, for example, that is not searchable / only searchable by friends of existing friends and one profile that can be found by anyone.
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Mashable posts some considerations for navigating the social media world (like not writing on your own Facebook wall or feeling the need to respond to all negative comments).
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Gosh, darn: apparently Friendster has blogs now, according to fishbowlNY. (I just logged in to my Friendster account to see how many of my friends were still active — of 66 friends, nine had logged in … since July.)
Morning Brief — May 8, 2008
Mashable reports that FORA.tv (sort of C-SPAN online) has managed to secure a few mil in funding. What this means for us is that FORA is likely to stick around — and cover our authors — for a while yet (at least until they burn through this latest pile of cash).
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Since we’re all now staking our claim online — whether individually or corporately — it probably behooves us to give a little thought to what we post online and how it appears. ReadWriteWeb talks about how we read online. Apparently, research shows that online reading habits are similar to how I used to “read” (in other words, skim) in college. So that means if I write a really long blog post, you won’t read it. Or something.
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A lot of marketing departments reach out to book groups. Booklist’s Book Group Buzz blog lists some sites that feature online reading guides.
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Ever booked an author on “Connie Martinson Talks Books”? Methinks pretty much yes if you’ve ever sent an author to L.A. LA Observed reports that she has donated her interviews to Claremont University.
